The Therapeutic State ｜ Guest： Paul Gottfried ｜ 1⧸30⧸23
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 2 minutes
Words per Minute
168.46538
Summary
Dr. Paul Gottfried joins me to talk about the concept of the therapeutic state, and why it is so important in the United States and the rest of the Western world. We also discuss the role of the welfare state and the role it plays in family policy.
Transcript
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We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
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Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
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I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
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Someone who I've had requested a number of times and I'm glad to say is finally here.
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Dr. Paul Gottfried, thanks for joining me, sir.
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For anyone who isn't familiar with Dr. Gottfried's work, he is, of course, the editor at Chronicles
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And I'm sure he'll tell us some more as we get into this.
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But we're going to be talking today primarily about, we'll talk about a few things, but we're
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going to be focusing primarily on the concept of a therapeutic state, which I think is really
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I think it's going to help people understand a lot about what is happening in the United
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So, Mr. Gottfried, could you go ahead and explain what the idea of the therapeutic state
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By the therapeutic state, I mean the typical political regime in which Western countries
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are now living and which seems to be the end product or the end point of a very long
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development, one that has to be traced back at least as far, I think, as the creation of
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the modern welfare state, which, you know, I've argued in my book, After Liberalism, has
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to be seen as beginning in the early 20th century with progressivism.
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It sort of continues in America through the New Deal.
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I mean, in Sweden, you have a social democratic government elected in the 1920s.
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Then you have an England, a labor government after the war, various socialist coalitions
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And what comes out of all of this is a government which becomes involved with economic redistribution,
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social engineering, and increasingly will colonize the family.
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I think that this, to some extent, is secondary in earlier phases of the welfare state.
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I don't think Franklin Roosevelt really cared very much about, you know, changing gender
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Maybe his wife did, but I don't think this was an overriding concern for him.
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In the United States, you know, LBJ talks about some of this stuff, but he's much more concerned
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with economic redistribution and with fighting the war in Vietnam.
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Nonetheless, I think by the 1960s, in the United States and in other Western democracies, the
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state does become involved in what's called family policy, and family policy will be inextricably linked to
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other things like fighting prejudice, discrimination, inequality in the family, patriarchy.
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All of these things come under attack as what I call the therapeutic state develops.
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And there's a very good book on the subject written by Christopher Lash, who actually wrote
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more than one book, on the therapeutic state, showing its development.
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He links it, I think, significantly to the Frankfurt School, or as I argue my books, the Frankfurt
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Because I think you see a full flowering of it here rather than in Germany, since most of its
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leaders come to the United States, with their particular brand of radicalism, cultural radicalism
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in the 1930s, they're driven out by the Nazis, they come here, they will partially reestablish
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themselves at the University of Frankfurt in Germany in 1951 and thereafter, but most of them
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remain in the United States, and while some of them are theoretical Marxists, what is the focus
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of their attention is fighting fascism as it manifests itself as prejudice in the bourgeois family.
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And this is, one might say, an invitation to social reconstruction, which is not lost on what we call
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in America, I suppose, the deep state or its counterparts in Europe, and more and more of the welfare state's
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activities become bound up with this, with family policy, reconstructing social relations, and what
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becomes, I think, in many ways, the most important aspect of this therapeutic reconstruction of society
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through the state is fighting prejudice, discrimination. And here I argue in my book on anti-fascism, that somehow the
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model of Nazi Germany is always uppermost, or kept uppermost in the minds of citizens who have been turned into
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subjects of the subjects of the therapeutic state. And they're told that unless they go along with this social
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reconstruction, not only the Germans, but the Americans and everyone else can become Nazis.
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And, you know, I show my book on anti-fascism, one typically finds the arguments over the last 20 to 30 years sort of going
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this way, that if you do not want to accept the latest wrinkle of feminism or LGBT, you know, this can lead ultimately to
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another Auschwitz. I mean, it's sort of, we'll just go in this ominous direction, unless we continue to receive guidance from
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enlightened social engineers. Now, as I indicated before the show began, I'm not quite sure how you got out of this, because the
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people who are pushing the therapeutic state are so powerful, they control media, education, all of the most important
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institutions in Western countries. And every time you send your kid to school, you know, they're going to come back with a
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gender reassignment or something else. And it's, it's, or, oh, they'll be taught to hate the white race, because they're, they're a
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race that discriminates by their very nature. And I think what you see over the last, since the 1960s,
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certainly, is a radicalization of this, of this therapeutic social engineering, it becomes more
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radical, and it becomes more hostile to what is traditional Christian bourgeois society, whatever
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existed, or Judeo-Christian society, whatever existed in this country before. What I grew up with in the
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1950s is obviously all evil. What, one of the latest wrinkles about this, and I'm always, you know,
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complaining to my wife, is I turn on TV, I don't see white people in advertisements anymore. I don't
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see white people, you know, and the only time you see them is they're villains, you know, and they're,
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they're committing heinous acts of racism or homophobia or something like that. Television
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entertainment has simply become social reconstruction. Yeah, someone has to play the
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villain in the, in the ADT home alarm commercials, right? That's the only time you see. Right, right.
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But it just goes on and on. I mean, they never give you breathing space. This is something I've
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noticed that in, you know, in the 60s, 70s, we sort of moved in this direction, this portentous
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direction, but it was done sort of slowly. You can catch your breath. Since the election of Joe Biden
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is president, it's, it's, you know, everything has, has moved exponentially toward the cultural left
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and towards this therapeutic reconstruction. Well, to your very point, you know, the president
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of the United States got on stage after calling his political opponents directly fascists. Right.
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And gave, you know, gave that speech about, you know, the, the, the eternal struggle against the
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enemy within, right? So I think that's exactly right. Now, one of the things I found very
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interesting about your concept, which you're, you know, I first interacted with because of
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Christopher Lash. So, so that's where I became aware of it, but, but I wanted to explore the
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transition. So hopefully we can, we can kind of trace the steps for people that can understand
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kind of how this emerged. So I think more and more people with kind of the resurgence of,
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of James Burnham are understanding the idea of the managerial revolution. And I'm, I'm wondering,
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given your description of the therapeutic stake with the managerial apparatus, was it always
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inevitable that the managerial apparatus would need to seek out a program like this to kind of expand
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its influence into the realm of places like the family where otherwise would be pushed back?
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Yeah. I, I addressed this in my book on after liberalism, liberalism being bourgeois liberalism in the
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19th century, uh, and the welfare, welfare states, democracy being post-liberal. This is the argument
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I'm making. And I, I say that, that one could have a welfare state and a managerial state of the kind
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that Burnham and Pedro Gonzalez and others and Sam Francis, one could have that kind of state.
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Uh, but you do not, you do not necessarily have to have a therapeutic state or one as extreme as what
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exists right now, but I would say it is a necessary precondition. You know, if you were living
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with the state as it existed in 1850, you couldn't do any of this because you would not have the
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apparatus, uh, the bureaucracy, the bureaucratic control that would be necessary to carry out this
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therapeutic experiment. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that that's a very interesting point. It's a,
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it may be not the necessary end goal, but it is a prerequisite for it to emerge. You know,
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Bertrand de Juvenal talks about these collapsing spheres of social influence, right? He talks about
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how for power to centralize, they have to get rid of the influence of things like the family and the
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church and, and these different organizations. And so I was just wondering if you thought that
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that was a natural part of the centralization of power, or if that this regime that has emerged now
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is particular to, I guess, this ideology and not power centralization itself.
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Right. Right. But I, I, I think one has to simply look at the sort of building blocks to,
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you know, that have to be, um, uh, that, that have to be created or constructed before you get to this
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stage. And, you know, you, you need a modern state. Uh, another thing is you need Christianity
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in a very, in a very decadent form, right? Where you would talk about loving kindness, universalism,
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but you're not too specific about doctrine, uh, or things in, you know, certainly the biblical
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tradition that, you know, point in a different direction. Um, I don't see too many therapeutic
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states in the Buddhist or Muslim world, right? So I, I, I, I think there is an affinity that it has to
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what I, I, I say a sort of decaying heretical kind of Christianity. Um, you also need a large,
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a large administrative state, a managerial state. Otherwise you're not going to be able to carry this
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out. Um, what's also helpful from the point of view of the therapists, the therapeutic state is
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our media that cooperate, which exist in every Western country. Now they're all the same. They
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just speak different languages. They have the same points of view. Uh, so you have a media apparatus and
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then you have public education, which pushes the same, the same doctrines. So, uh, with, without,
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without these, these preexisting, um, uh, or, uh, pre-existing, uh, pre-existing institutions or
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preconditions, you're not going to get to the therapeutic state. Um, what, what, what I find
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fascinating is the, the way it has accelerated, you know, in the last 20 to 30 years. Um, even in the
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1980s, I could not imagine, you know, gender reassignment being taught or the, uh, the war against the
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white race, the war against the white race led by white leftists, which makes it even more
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interesting. Right. Or, you know, these, uh, Black Lives Matter riots, Antifa riots, you've got white
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people, affluent white people joining this. So, I mean, what you see is a cultural transformation
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that, that has already occurred. And, um, I, I, it's like something that almost, in my case,
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it was something that, that was able to sneak up on me because I was not even aware that these
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changes were happening so quickly. Um, uh, and even moving, you know, from the 1980s, uh, to the
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early 2000s, it's, it's, it's very, it's, it's incredible how quickly, uh, the therapeutic
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state became radicalized and radicalized much of the younger generation in America.
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It's very interesting that you pointed out that you need a Christianity that's completely
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severed from the doctrine, like that, that, that has many of the, the principles of that might
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create some kind of universal or compassionate understanding, but it, but it's completely
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removed. Do you think that the, uh, the, the, the kind of the final, uh, removal of those
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principles was part of the acceleration process? The, the fact that you had many of these barriers
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that you, like you said, would have been unthinkable to, to pass in maybe the seventies even, or the
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eighties suddenly became very past. Say you had, you know, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
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saying that they were for traditional marriage in 2008. Right. And, but, and now you have
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Republicans voting for the redefinition, the permanent codification of the redefinition of
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marriage. Yeah. I think one of the problems is I've argued, and this has made me very unpopular
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in the conservative movement, as you know, is that, um, the, uh, the conservative movement
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won't stand up for anything except maybe corporate tax breaks and making war somewhere, you know,
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helping defense industries. Um, you cannot get them to stand up for moral principles of
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any kind. The principles have existed for thousands of years that everyone assumed when I was, they,
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they won't, they won't defend this. Um, and you know, as I like to point out, the first generation
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of the Frankfurt school was con socially more conservative than the so-called conservative
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movement in the United States. They considered homosexuality to be a sexual deviance. Herbert
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Marcuse, Theodore Adorno, they all believe this. Uh, now we have to glorify it. Not only that,
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but we have, you know, gender reassigned Republicans coming on Fox news, you know, to push the Republican
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party. Uh, I mean, there is nowhere these people will not go looking for votes. You know, they don't
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have any principles, uh, you know, they keep saying we have principles, we have values. I'm still looking
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for them. Or, you know, as, as somebody once said that someone's, uh, said about some English
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statesman that he has, uh, he has values. He changes them all the time, you know, changing them.
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So, so I'm interested cause you, you, uh, mentioned the Frankfurt school a number of times,
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and there's a lot of debate on the right specifically right now about kind of the origins
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or even the nomenclature of cultural Marxism, right? A lot of people push back and say,
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this isn't Marxism or this isn't related. Marxism is a economic theory. It has nothing to do with
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this. What would you say to, to, to the notion that this is cultural Marxism, what we're experiencing
00:17:00.280
now? Well, you must know my position. I think it has very little to do with Marxism. And although,
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you know, and there is, there's a kind of transitional stage, which you see in the Frankfurt
00:17:10.980
school, because, and by the word, the word Kulturmarxismus in German is a derogatory term,
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but I can't think of anything, anything else to call them, uh, except, you know, the, uh, members
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of the Frankfurter Schule or something, but I, it's very, very hard to come up with another term.
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Um, but what they do is they turn the focus of social cultural, of social radicalism to culture
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in the family without ever, and certainly in the case of Marcuse, who's my teacher, he never
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renounces Marxism. They'll defend anything in Marx, remember saying in a classroom, uh, and he will,
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you know, and say he makes some, some sort of, um, uh, clumsy attempt to defend everything in Marx,
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but, but it was the social radicalism, which was the essence of what the Frankfurt school push.
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Um, and, uh, and they were, I think, properly, uh, chastised, um, and, and worse than punished if
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they got ahold of them by communist regimes. You know, this is not Marxism or Marxist-Leninist,
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this is some decadent bourgeois philosophy you're giving us. And the communists were right. You
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know, this, this was not Marxism. And then by the time, you know, but, but, by the time that I hear
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Mark Levin on Fox News explaining that the reason we have gender reassignment is it's Mark, it's,
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it's American Marxism. Well, it's no, it's not, it's nothing to do with Marxism. Um, it's what I call
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in my, in one of my books, the post-Marxist left. It is still recognizably of the left because, uh,
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these cultural radicals talk about equality. Uh, they attack Western parochialism. They want
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universal. These are all, I might say leftist attitudes or gestures, but they are not the same
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as Marxism, which is a socioeconomic system and which, you know, in its moral positions is quite
00:19:01.520
conservative. Like the French communist party condemned homosexuality. It won't let homosexuals
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into the party. Yeah. Stalin, not exactly a fan party. Yeah. Interesting because I think a lot of
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people get confused because they see the conflict between early Vanguard leftism and kind of the
00:19:23.040
managerial establishment. Sam Francis said that it was, it was a misunderstanding, right? That the
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Vanguard left was kind of harassing the managers, but the managers were already moving in the direction
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of adopting these things. They simply weren't moving fast enough. They didn't want to boil the
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frog too quickly. Right. Do you think that that's a break as to why people misunderstand kind of the
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origins of this and the, the attention of between maybe corporate America and leftism that doesn't
00:19:50.880
exist in the same way today? Right. I, I, I think there, there also is a tendency in the United,
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and not in the conservative movement, certainly since the 1950s to call anything they don't like
00:20:01.620
socialism or Marxism, you know, and there are many unpleasant things out there that are not
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socialist or Marxist. And I remember somebody coming up to the late Thomas Molnar, this was at a
00:20:13.500
Philadelphia society meeting in the 1960s. I'm sort of giving my age away here, but the there was some
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young man said, uh, Professor Molnar, um, you know, communism and Nazism, they are the same thing.
00:20:27.140
And he sort of smiled and said, not exactly. And the, that's right. They're not exactly the same
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thing. They may have some overlap, but you know, and they're, they're both unpleasant, but they're
00:20:36.220
different. And, uh, I think this, this is true about what I call now just wokeism, uh, which is not
00:20:43.580
anti-capitalist at all, which means that it cannot possibly be Marxist, right? And Marx, the Marxists
00:20:49.980
would want to overthrow the corporate capitalists. The, uh, uh, the wokesters are, are delighted, you
00:20:55.340
know, to have the, the support of corporate capitalism. And anyone who really believes that
00:21:01.060
a woke regime is going to go after, you know, uh, Bezos or people like that is, has to be crazy.
00:21:07.780
I mean, these are the ones supporting the regime, uh, Soros. I mean, you know, they're, uh, or whoever's
00:21:14.620
managing Coca-Cola or Disney world, uh, they're an alliance with the woke left. They give money to
00:21:20.500
the democratic party in the United States. Um, so, you know, it's, uh, say, well, you know, well,
00:21:25.880
there were some, some people back then when the communists were in power who were capitalists,
00:21:30.180
who supported them very few. Um, uh, and, you know, they typically supported communism in Russia,
00:21:36.860
not in the United States. Uh, and they made money out of it. But here there's a very close working
00:21:42.700
alliance between corporate capitalism and the cultural left. You know, the, uh, it's, it's
00:21:48.540
something which I think when forces one to question whether we're looking at Marxism.
00:21:53.460
Now on the other side of that coin, a lot of people will say the things that are happening
00:21:57.780
right now are a natural consequence of capitalism or liberalism, that they say that these are kind of
00:22:04.460
the eventual outcomes because, you know, they're looking to standardize consumption. And, and again,
00:22:09.800
Francis makes this argument, I think in some ways that, that this means that you, when you're having
00:22:16.360
an optimized company, you're always going to have a movement towards this. Do you feel like that's
00:22:20.860
true? Oh, I think it's totally true. No, I agree with Francis on that. I think, you know,
00:22:25.580
what, uh, Marx called, uh, or Hilferding called spätkapitalismus. Late capitalism very
00:22:32.000
definitely has a connection to wokeism. Um, and, you know, and I think part of the motive is
00:22:37.280
economic. You want to break down national barriers. Uh, traditional religious attitudes are bad because
00:22:43.140
women will stay on home and raise kids rather than have abortions, you know, and become consumers
00:22:48.560
and so forth. Um, I'm not saying this explains everything, but I think there's no economic
00:22:54.080
incompatibility between this cultural radicalism and late capitalism.
00:22:58.460
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Instacart groceries that over deliver. So I think the question that a lot of people have when they
00:23:32.680
look at the therapeutic state, well, actually, before we get there, I want to ask you one more
00:23:36.880
thing on kind of the nature of the therapeutic state. I want to get to that before we go any
00:23:40.640
further. So one thing that I've noticed, I think is that the demystification of the human being has
00:23:47.600
been a really key part of this, right? The idea that everything is knowable, everything is
00:23:52.940
quantifiable, everything is programmable, that you can put experts in charge of every aspect of human
00:23:59.260
life, gives the state the authority to then step in and control these areas.
00:24:06.200
No, I think it's absolutely right that people are quantified, they no longer have spiritual worth.
00:24:12.160
But at the same time, there is a hierarchy, a spiritual hierarchy that's being created.
00:24:16.060
Like, the black underclass obviously is more important than some white working class person,
00:24:23.700
you know, living in my town, which is, or, you know, in some Rust Belt place. So there was a
00:24:30.500
hierarchy, or the homosexual lesbian has a higher moral status than the heterosexual, right? We treat
00:24:36.580
him with much more respect. And the transgendered may have even more. So there is a hierarchy,
00:24:43.120
a kind of mystical spiritual hierarchy that's created, even within this, this world context.
00:24:50.360
But I agree with you, it's the quantifiable nature of human beings that allow the welfare state to
00:24:56.060
get said that, you know, these, every everything is measurable, you know, human beings, how long you're
00:25:03.260
going to live, how much you're going to cost the state, what you're what you're worth in terms of your
00:25:07.640
labor, like, you know, explain, you know, what's good about a mother and a housewife? Well, she really
00:25:13.420
produces this quantum of labor. I've seen this from from from libertarians, conservatives, trying to
00:25:20.080
quantify it. You know, the human relation is secondary, but the labor can be quiet. And by the way, I think
00:25:27.260
libertarians do a lot of this stuff. They love quantifying things.
00:25:31.660
Yeah, no, I agree. Unfortunately, that is a tendency that runs not just left, but right as
00:25:37.160
well. In fact, I think it's the right's willingness to embrace much of this language, which is a real
00:25:42.380
problem. Today, nothing is evil. Everything is a psychological condition, right? Everything is,
00:25:47.440
oh, they're crazy. They're psychotic. They're, you know, they're some kind of narcissistic personality
00:25:53.120
disorder. There's a removal of kind of the concept of evil. And that means that everything is kind of
00:25:59.320
can be ameliorated through this process, right? That, you know, bring in enough psychologists or
00:26:04.380
psychiatrists, put people on the right plan, deliver the right message, grow people up inside these
00:26:09.740
different institutions, and you can completely shape the human being. And that thing seems to be
00:26:14.200
like a key part of the therapeutic state. Yeah, but again, there's a contradiction there. I do mention
00:26:19.340
that point about what I call the pathologization of dissent in my book on multiculturalism. But I think
00:26:25.440
we've gone beyond that. There is a return to good and evil. But evil are the norm, the normal people
00:26:31.480
are evil. The people who are doing things that would have been considered insane, perverse in the
00:26:37.220
past, they are, they are, they're really spiritual guides to the rest of us. Like, you know, you bring
00:26:44.480
on TV and some gay person who says, you know, I'm exploring a new dimension of love and of human
00:26:51.400
feeling and the whoever's, you know, interviewing them. You see them on the, what is it, the four,
00:26:57.520
the five, sometimes I turn on these awful programs, but they're, they're truly are treated like
00:27:02.720
Christian saints. So I, and then of course, the people who oppose this are not simply sick,
00:27:09.700
they're evil, right? I mean, President Biden told us this. These are evil people. I mean,
00:27:14.700
they're like Nazis. It may be even worse because they're, you know, they're so insidious and
00:27:19.240
that they don't always surface. And the only thing we know about them is they voted for Donald
00:27:23.960
Trump. So, yeah, I think you're right to point out that maybe the, maybe the scientism was a
00:27:33.000
transitory ideology, right? It broke, it broke down and gave a rationale for the reason that these
00:27:38.420
things need to be dismantled, but it was never going to be permanent, right? It eventually would
00:27:42.200
have to be replaced with the ethical system you're talking about. There was no neutral institution.
00:27:47.360
It's just a way to, to disassemble what was there and then reassemble something else under the guise
00:27:52.800
of this neutrality. Yeah. I think what we saw, the use of the, the, the scientism is one might say
00:27:59.360
a brief period where there's some attempt made to retain a relationship to reality, like, you know,
00:28:08.700
science. Now, you know, now of course, you know, science is racist and sexist. We've sort of gone
00:28:14.860
beyond that. We've gone into total lunacy. One of the things that I hope that really interests me
00:28:20.760
is how anyone can believe this woke nonsense. And this is not like Marxism, which claims to be
00:28:27.560
scientific, which to a certain degree can argue even rationally. Even the Nazis could do this,
00:28:34.620
you know, intermittently, although they behave, you know, quite demonically. But now we're talking
00:28:40.220
about people who are totally, it will make no sense. You cannot even, and then different words
00:28:46.640
are condemned on different days of the week because they're offensive. And you're told that
00:28:51.900
mathematics is racist. You're not supposed to study this anymore and so forth. The communists,
00:28:58.340
no matter what, you know, what their theory may have indicated, knew that science was important.
00:29:02.900
Right. They leave you alone. It's science. These people won't, you know, and they've already invaded
00:29:09.700
the medical field. And, you know, as my son and brother, both of whom are physicians told me,
00:29:15.700
you go to medical school now, you're absolutely brainwashed with wokeness. You have to go through
00:29:21.740
woke sessions. My late wife grew up in communist Poland, and it was not as bad. I mean, the communists
00:29:30.680
were not as bad. These people are, control everything. They're total lunatics. It's like,
00:29:35.800
you know, I'm watching something on TV about Jesse, Jesse Owen, and he ran in the 1936 Olympics,
00:29:42.260
and the Nazis were controlling this. And they were, of course, very unpleasant people,
00:29:46.480
but Hitler did shake his hand, you know. Now everything is woke. Do you believe it'll even
00:29:52.720
let you into something unless you, you know, you practice wokeness, and you have to wear a woke
00:29:57.800
shirt if you play hockey, right? If you don't want to wear this, they're going to throw you off the
00:30:02.160
team. I mean, this goes beyond anything that I can imagine. I mean, communist countries were not this
00:30:09.140
crazy. You know, they left you alone, at least part of the time. They left certain institutions
00:30:15.480
alone. What I find interesting about this woke left is it embraces everything, everything in every
00:30:23.400
Western country at the same time. You know, and I think people hundreds of years from now, if they
00:30:30.240
survive this, may try to understand how this happened historically. Because, you know, even though I
00:30:37.400
write books on this, I'm still mystified. It's quite wild. You know, one thing that always captivated me
00:30:43.780
was looking at Oswald Spangler. And he, in the Carolina West, he said that, he predicted that the
00:30:49.800
West would walk away from science and math. He said that, you know, you basically, they would grow tired
00:30:56.020
of the constriction of these, the quantification, it would become too exact, and they would, they would
00:31:03.040
fall away from this and pursue like a second spirituality. Do you feel like wokeness might be the coming of
00:31:08.780
that, where this is now all-encompassing, and it forces people to abandon basic things like science and math
00:31:14.620
after this? Of course, Spangler has a relatively happy outcome, because you have Caesars rising.
00:31:20.700
You know, and taking power, I don't think we'll be that lucky.
00:31:26.080
You know, the, what is the term? It's something, it's not part of, maybe it's not part of Genesis,
00:31:31.800
there's some other term he uses for this about the, the second spirituality.
00:31:43.280
Yeah, that we might well be living through that phase, because in many ways, wokeness is a sort
00:31:51.220
of a crude, insulting imitation of Christianity.
00:32:00.480
Yeah, absolutely. So, the thing that you've hit on multiple times, and I think is the big
00:32:05.020
question for a lot of people, is this seems so insane, how can, you know, it can't go on forever,
00:32:11.420
right? Like, like, eventually you lose function, like your, your society stops producing, it can't
00:32:17.740
land airplanes, it can't produce new prescription drugs, it, you know, it can't do the things it used
00:32:23.160
to do. And something has to give, I guess there's a couple questions wrapped up in that. But what do
00:32:29.580
you think about this idea that, that naturally, there will be some kind of pushback, because like,
00:32:34.700
the natural consequences of this mass ideological control have to, like, bear fruit at some point?
00:32:41.140
Yeah, I, but I think the pushback may come in the form of a disintegration of the alliance.
00:32:47.560
And I've argued this for years, that the woke alliance is unnatural. And it's not like, you know,
00:32:55.520
the Democratic Party, around 1930, so you had Irish Catholics, Russian Jews, Southern whites,
00:33:03.060
everybody voting for, because they just, you voted for one party rather than the other, right? Your
00:33:10.060
You know, and you got favors from the party. Not now we're talking about what is a full time
00:33:16.240
revolutionary movement. That's, you know, utterly devastating society and destroying us mentally,
00:33:23.800
as well as materially. It's, it's, but it's, it's made up of groups that don't have any natural
00:33:30.520
cohesion with, with, with each other. So you have, I mean, what, what do Muslims in Europe,
00:33:36.960
Muslim fundamentalists who are being brought in? What do they have in common with feminists or
00:33:41.840
homosexuals who are part of the alliance? Uh, what do black nationalists have in common with
00:33:47.560
transgender? I mean, you look, I mean, you know what they have in common. They hate the white
00:33:51.340
Christian core population, uh, right? The autochthonist population that has been there all
00:33:56.640
long. Um, even if it's weakened and it's lost its belief system and so forth, they still see it as
00:34:02.540
their enemy. Uh, so you, you know, you could unite against a shared enemy, but once you've done that,
00:34:08.760
what else do they have in common? I mean, what kind of program, but, and, and of course it seems
00:34:13.940
to me the really nasty groups in this alliance, the physically nasty groups, Muslims, black nationalists
00:34:19.180
have been very restrained. You know, they've let the, uh, the feminists, the gays, others sort of run
00:34:25.680
these movements. Um, at some point they may want to take over and take much more power for themselves.
00:34:32.720
Um, and they'll start fighting among each other as well. So I, I really don't see this as a very
00:34:39.200
cohesive alliance beyond destroying what is perceived as a common enemy. Yeah. Curtis Yarvin called the
00:34:46.880
left a mystery cult of power and that the only thing that actually binds them together is their desire
00:34:52.520
to kind of disassemble the current hierarchy. And, and, and that's really all that's necessary for
00:34:58.340
their political opposition. I think you bring up a good point, but the, the only thing that I think
00:35:02.880
about when you're talking about kind of the where warfare of those different groups is many of the
00:35:06.820
ones that you cite as those who are like morally opposed to other people inside their own, uh, their
00:35:12.920
own movement. The only thing is that the, it seems like the culture is assimilating those adverse
00:35:20.120
movements faster than they are pushing back against the culture. Right. So by the, I don't know how
00:35:25.400
long it's going to exist or go on. I think at some point there is going to be a breakup. Uh, you know,
00:35:31.520
the, uh, the black nationalists may humor this sort of, uh, uh, effeminate kid who's changing his
00:35:38.240
gender or something like that. Uh, they despise him, you know, and they, uh, they probably feel sick
00:35:44.660
being in the same alliance system with them. You are right that they keep, you know, they keep on moving,
00:35:48.480
but at some point it will be a question of, of who gets to run the show. And I think that that,
00:35:55.000
of course they may by then have destroyed everything because they're a totally destructive force. Um,
00:36:00.680
but I think they will, they will start fighting with each other.
00:36:04.140
You know, I think that's true. Like I said, I just think, uh, you know, think of like second or
00:36:08.460
third generation Muslim, you know, children are parroting more talking points from the woke left than
00:36:15.040
they are their own religious doctrine against the aspects of the woke left that they would in
00:36:19.400
theory oppose. So I, yeah, but, but they're all anti-Western. I mean, they hate Western Christian
00:36:25.320
society and, uh, they may hate it for different, but they also may hate it for different reasons,
00:36:30.660
you know, um, uh, like, you know, the kid who's overdosing on drugs and is changing his gender
00:36:37.560
or something has as a different reason to hate Western civilization than the Muslim, uh, who comes
00:36:44.500
here or the black nationalists. It's not, but they're, they're willing to cooperate because of
00:36:50.280
what they hate. Uh, here, my, the influence of Carl Schmidt keeps, keeps creeping in about friend
00:36:56.180
enemy relations, but, uh, it is, it is the sheer hostility, I think, which, uh, which allows the
00:37:03.700
alliance to cohere. And I think at some point it is going to, it will break up. The question is just
00:37:08.600
when in my view. So once they've defeated the shared public enemy, eventually they'll have no
00:37:14.200
other option, but to turn inward on, on the coalition. I think there's, there's a lot of
00:37:19.080
validity to that. So, so we've discussed the therapeutic state here. I wanted to hit a few
00:37:23.700
other things that I think are pretty relevant. You're a gentleman who's been known for, I would
00:37:30.360
think it'd be fair to characterize you as a paleoconservative in many ways. Do you think
00:37:34.080
that would be fair? Yeah, that's, that's true. Although I, if you read this, this new anthology
00:37:40.480
we put on paleoconservatism, it's obvious that there are many differences within the paleoconservative.
00:37:46.660
Oh, sure. Absolutely. Um, you know, I, I, we say we agree about first principle, but as you know,
00:37:51.940
if I look at some of the younger people associated with the paleoconservative camp, they tend to be
00:37:58.220
populist, right-wing populist, heavily influenced by Sam Francis, James Burnham, and to a lesser
00:38:04.640
extent by my writing. Um, the older generation of paleoconservatives, uh, tend to be sort of social
00:38:12.020
reactionaries, um, high church Anglicans, Catholics, uh, who are sort of hungering for a Catholic church
00:38:19.640
that ceased to exist a long time ago. Um, but the, uh, they, they really are very different. They're
00:38:25.860
sort of different mindsets, so they, they do cooperate. Um, and in terms of the conservative
00:38:31.960
establishment, they both are outsiders. Although if I'm not mistaken about this, some of the younger
00:38:37.680
populist, um, may become the wave of the future. They're not going to be isolated the way I spent
00:38:43.840
my life, you know, and, uh, you go to, I went to this national conservative conference, which I spoke
00:38:50.260
and, um, you know, most of those young people sounded very much like me. I was telling my wife
00:38:55.520
it was scary because I was like isolated for the last 60 years and really, you know, now everyone's
00:39:01.200
being to sound like me or I sound like them. Um, but, uh, uh, uh, I, I, I think, uh, the paleoconservatives
00:39:08.880
of a younger generation are becoming right-wing populist, uh, the paleoconservatives of an older
00:39:14.520
generation, I think are of a different cast of mine.
00:39:17.160
Um, I think that's very interesting. And that is the, the aspect that I wanted to talk
00:39:21.640
to you about, because I do think it's interesting that a gentleman like yourself, you know, was
00:39:25.960
at the, you know, the national convention here that so many people who are up and coming
00:39:31.180
in conservatism seem to be falling away from this old, uh, the, this kind of eighties and
00:39:39.400
nineties coalition and moving, um, much towards the ideas of guys like you, Sam Francis, Pat
00:39:45.600
Buchanan, a re a big recognition recently, I've noticed about, you know, kind of the
00:39:49.580
validity of many predictions of, of guy, a guy like Pat Buchanan. And, and I've, again,
00:39:55.460
I'm sure you guys have your differences, but just very interesting that there's been a big
00:39:59.760
shift. Like you said, the, many of the people who are offering solutions are in many ways
00:40:04.580
reaching back to a tradition that might've been diversified, but it has been held very
00:40:09.380
outside the conservative mainstream for a long time.
00:40:11.440
Yeah. I think what the paleo conservatives begin with is a critique. And as I argue in
00:40:18.060
some of my books on conservatism, they are not the same, you know, as the conservatives
00:40:22.200
of the 19th century or some other period, um, nor are they identical with the post-war
00:40:27.820
conservative movement of the 1950s, which was pretty much thrown together by Bill Buckley
00:40:33.380
and his friends and was focused on fighting the communist menace. Although there were people
00:40:39.480
who become associated with that, with that movement who later become paleoconservatives.
00:40:45.820
Um, but the paleoconservatives begin with the critique of neoconservatism, you know, and
00:40:51.100
they tend to be generally on the right of the neoconservatives on social questions, uh, social
00:40:56.560
and cultural questions. And they start with the critique. Um, uh, how can you call yourself
00:41:02.740
a conservative if you believe in, you know, spreading democracy all over the, why, why is
00:41:09.300
your view, why are democracy and human rights to be considered conservative positions? Um,
00:41:14.840
so this, this, this, I think is the beginning of, of, of a paleoconservative protest, which
00:41:21.940
it is, it's, it's, it's, it sort of never moves much beyond that. It is a protest against
00:41:27.320
the neoconservative takeover of the right, which is not led by people who necessarily
00:41:32.800
were part of the Bill Buckley conservatism. Although some of the people associated with
00:41:37.880
do become paleoconservatives, the, the, the paleoconservative leaders, myself included,
00:41:43.600
um, uh, typically come from the second or third rank conservatives of the earlier period where
00:41:51.720
we're not the leaders. Um, but we, but we do lead the opposition to the neoconservatives for
00:41:56.740
which we are, um, pretty much pushed out of the conservative movement. We're called racist,
00:42:01.920
anti-Semites, any, any, any name they could call us. Um, and for a while we rely to libertate,
00:42:07.760
to sort of right-wing libertarians with whom we've remained friendly. Um, although when I, I'm,
00:42:13.560
I really cannot consider myself a libertarian. Um, but I, I think, I think what happens is much
00:42:20.920
of that paleocritique is taken over by the younger generation. And you're right.
00:42:26.500
Right. They, they become much more, um, uh, important or significant in the conservative
00:42:32.020
movement, um, in the, in the last 10 years, five to 10 years, despite the fact they have
00:42:38.320
very few resources because the people with all the resources are part of the Murdoch media empire,
00:42:44.040
right? The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, National Review. Um, uh, the, the, the, the people on our
00:42:52.020
side, uh, have none of this control. We, we, we have, you know, we have less money, less media,
00:42:57.740
access to media and so forth. Yet. I, I think we're, we're making up for the gap between ourselves
00:43:04.820
and the, you know, the people who hold, uh, all these good cards. Um, what, one of, one of the
00:43:10.760
things I've observed with our magazine is that we are high quality magazine. We don't have, we don't
00:43:16.340
have many resources. National Review is becoming an awful magazine. It's barely readable, but you
00:43:22.860
know, they're sitting on a gold mine. You know, people throw money at them. They can be on Fox
00:43:27.400
News, right for the Wall Street Journal. We have none of these things on our side yet. I think we
00:43:33.500
are making headway, which, you know, is sort of an argument that there is at Zeitgeist and, uh,
00:43:39.480
on the right. And we, we represent it, even if we do not have the resources of those who still dominate
00:43:47.060
the, um, the heights of the, uh, uh, conservative, uh, establishment. Yeah. I think the reason that so
00:43:55.400
much of this has been powerful and you, you know, say what you want about Donald Trump, but he should
00:44:00.380
always, I think, get credit for his ability to kind of shatter the window when it comes to the
00:44:06.340
discussion of what was allowed of the conservative movement prior to him and what isn't. And, you
00:44:11.700
know, these issues like immigration and foreign policy, the economy and the protection of jobs,
00:44:17.820
things that the conservative movement was actively against their own base and fought their own base
00:44:23.680
tooth and nail at every step now is getting increasingly difficult for the conservative mainstream
00:44:30.840
to continue to do this. We see much of conservative Washington still trying to support
00:44:36.100
things like intervention in Ukraine and those kinds of things, but, but they are running into
00:44:41.160
more and more, uh, contestation from their own base. It's getting harder and harder for that. And I
00:44:46.780
think that's why the dialogue is shifting. The right wasn't allowed to interact with this Vanguard the way
00:44:51.840
the left was for most, you know, for most of your lifetime and certainly all of my lifetime. But now it
00:44:57.880
seems almost essential because what's left of the conservative establishment has so little to offer
00:45:02.120
its base that if they don't reach outside of their current worldview, they're, you know, they're just
00:45:07.180
No, I think, I think you're right. But I think the most important factor, um, in explaining the
00:45:13.320
reorientation of the right, um, is, is corporate capitalism for years, for most of my life, the right
00:45:21.800
defended corporate capitalism, right? I mean, people like the Bush family, you know, they supported,
00:45:27.380
right. And, and others, you know, and of course what we were in favor of capitalism, capitalism
00:45:32.600
meant big business. Um, and you heard this for, for, for, for, for many years. Um, I think what
00:45:38.880
has become obvious is that corporate capitalism now stands with the cultural left. So if you want to
00:45:44.540
make an argument, you know, in favor of the working class against the, these corporate boards,
00:45:49.760
uh, it's very easy to do, uh, in a way that was not true when the working class voted for, you know,
00:45:56.360
democratic political candidates and it was assumed that corporate capitalists would side with the
00:46:02.180
cultural social right. No, I think that's, that's absolutely true. Uh, so the last part of this that
00:46:10.620
I wanted to talk about, and we have a lot of questions stacking up here, so maybe we won't go too
00:46:15.480
long on this one, but I thought I wanted to get your opinion. I think that one of the things that's
00:46:20.220
very difficult for conservatives to understand, um, I've made this argument a few times is that
00:46:25.860
when, for instance, they're having the discussion on, you know, uh, trans kids or something, they think
00:46:30.920
they're having a discussion about biology, like the, the biological facts of the situation. I explained
00:46:37.060
to them, they're having an argument about the civil rights revolution, um, that the right of the
00:46:42.240
government to enter into the family is inextricably linked to the right of the government to interfere
00:46:47.540
with other personal decisions that people make. And I think that it's very difficult for them to
00:46:53.100
understand like the legal framework and what is happening. I'm Christopher Caldwell's book about
00:46:56.940
the age of entitlement, I think has done a lot of work here recently. It's something that more people
00:47:01.280
are acknowledging, but it's still a hard concept for them to grasp. I totally agree with you. I I've
00:47:06.900
read, uh, Christopher Caldwell's, I agreed with him, uh, and I was absolutely shocked to find that
00:47:12.220
he was writing for weekly standard and national review because he's on our side. Uh, he probably
00:47:18.640
wouldn't recognize that because we don't have the influence or power that his present allies do,
00:47:23.120
but, you know, you're absolutely correct. Um, I have argued this for many years and I've been
00:47:28.460
attacked as a racist, uh, or insensitive or something like that. Uh, as I, as I point out in order to
00:47:35.000
say that arguing that the civil rights revolution, um, really is the beginning point for the wokeness
00:47:42.820
and everything we're now seeing does not mean that I think Jim Crow is nice, uh, or, you know,
00:47:48.680
we should forgive whoever killed Medgar Evers or so forth. Um, history is very complex and, uh,
00:47:55.340
sometimes, um, uh, sometimes you can find some good that is linked or tied up with things that are
00:48:02.620
very bad. And I think the civil rights revolution is one of them that, you know, there was a just
00:48:07.940
cause behind it, but it empowered institutions that have totally destroyed society, American
00:48:14.480
society. And to some extent, I think this has influenced European society because Europe is a
00:48:20.100
satellite of ours, Western Europe, particularly they do whatever we do five minutes later. Um, and
00:48:25.840
they read our books and, you know, I say this as a European historian and I speak several languages
00:48:30.580
and I can write several, I, I, I understand. I, you know, Europe had a great civilization.
00:48:36.180
It doesn't any longer. I don't see evidence of this or at the United States, um, uh, United States
00:48:42.760
heavily influences or shapes the values of European countries, Western Europe, in a lesser extent,
00:48:48.820
Eastern Europe, but even in Eastern Europe, this is now true. Uh, Hungary being one of the few
00:48:53.960
holdouts. Um, but the, uh, I think the civil rights revolution has profound, profoundly bad
00:49:01.580
influence on American society. It does produce some good. I mean, you know, if a black family
00:49:06.840
can eat at a restaurant in the South and they will be kept, I, I'm not sure that without the
00:49:11.400
civil rights revolution, those things would not have happened anyhow, but the civil rights
00:49:15.360
revolution certainly hastened them. Um, what it did, however, was to bring government social
00:49:20.720
engineering into every aspect of our life. And the people who held these positions were social
00:49:26.580
radicals. We've radicalized our society. And remember the civil rights act of 1964, not only
00:49:33.900
dealt with blacks, it also covered women. So we were able to carry out the feminist revolution at the
00:49:39.260
same time. Um, yeah, the, uh, the, the, the position taken by some conservative groups that I find
00:49:46.840
absolutely insufferable is to argue that all these bad things sort of happened five minutes ago
00:49:52.840
where things were going quite well, you know, and, you know, gay marriage is okay. And this is,
00:49:58.400
and maybe the, the gender reassignment is going a little too far or something. Uh, and of course,
00:50:03.140
next week it'll be, it's not, it would not be gender reassignment. It'll be sexualizing the very
00:50:07.680
young, although gender reassignment will be okay. You know, for older people, it just keeps moving
00:50:12.520
and going with the flow. And I, I think as scholars, it behooves us to go back and to see the
00:50:20.280
foundations of what we're now living through. And, uh, I certainly think the civil rights movement is,
00:50:26.900
is, is an integral, uh, an integral part of it. It is, it is, uh, it is foundational for understanding
00:50:33.180
everything else that has happened. Um, the argument that somehow civil rights leaders would all be
00:50:39.540
appalled if they saw what is happening is untrue. John Lewis, Jim Clyburn, other civil rights
00:50:46.460
pioneers are happy with everything else that's happened since then. You know, they've gone along
00:50:52.260
with every stage of the revolution, uh, quite possibly Martin Luther King would do that as well
00:50:57.720
if he were still alive at the age of a hundred and something. But, um, I, I think it's important to
00:51:03.580
understand that without looking at the civil rights revolution, you cannot understand
00:51:08.100
the managerial institutional basis for the revolution that we're living through.
00:51:14.440
Yeah. And it's amazing. I think you're right to point out that you can have something that was a
00:51:18.680
real problem. And, and, and as Caldwell points out was approached by most of Americans, probably in
00:51:24.200
good faith, willing to grant the government, these powers in their thought temporarily to solve a
00:51:29.560
problem that they thought didn't really affect their area. And suddenly the government has this power.
00:51:33.700
It wouldn't be the first time you think that small government conservatives would understand that
00:51:37.000
handing government domain in these areas was not going to end just at the problem they want solved.
00:51:42.940
Yeah. One of the things I find interesting is, well, the civil rights commission will be okay.
00:51:46.720
Cause we're putting this black person in who may be a Republican and may think of voting.
00:51:52.240
Even if you have this black person who's Republican, the whole institution is terrible.
00:51:56.640
You know, it's, it's there to engage in social engineering. You want to get rid of it.
00:52:00.320
Um, and at this point you have so many layers of, of social engineering bureaucracy. You don't even
00:52:06.960
know where to begin. And by the way, it's not just at the state level. Uh, it's at the, at the federal
00:52:12.280
level, it's the state level at the local level. Uh, and it's invaded the entire educational system,
00:52:17.940
including medical school and engineering school.
00:52:20.260
Which is particularly terrifying because that's when that competence breakdown really comes all
00:52:25.280
these people who thought that, yeah, with everyone who thought the scientism would protect us, that
00:52:29.580
those things would remain neutral is quickly learning that actually that, that isn't the case.
00:52:34.280
All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and take a few questions here. I see some excellent ones
00:52:38.120
forming up here. I'm sure the audience would like to pick your brain on some different topics here.
00:52:43.200
So let's check real quick. Uh, Norco Republican here for $5 asks, Mr. Gottfried, are you familiar with the
00:52:48.680
philosopher, uh, Byung-Chulam may be the way you say that. I'm sure I'm saying that wrong. Uh,
00:52:53.320
Han's idea of the palliative society. It's somewhat similar to the therapeutic state.
00:52:59.520
It looks like something that a Chinese scholar meditated on and came up with this, uh, with this
00:53:05.540
term. I, I, I, I can, I have some idea what the palliative state means, but I've never read the, uh,
00:53:15.340
All right. Let's go ahead and see, uh, Brad didn't hear just donating. Thank you very much,
00:53:20.480
Brad. Appreciate that. Uh, creeper here, weirdo for $5. Thank you. Is wokeism the attempt of
00:53:26.200
communists to use capitalism to lead to a communist revolution? I remember hearing that idea
00:53:31.320
somewhere. You went into that a little bit, but I don't know if you want to touch on that anymore.
00:53:36.560
No, I think, I think this gentleman might, might forget that notion. Uh, it's totally misleading.
00:53:42.700
Thank you. We have, uh, Heath here for $5. Is this basically biolism giving high status to low
00:53:50.440
status people, but based on social hierarchy rather than economics? Uh, well, I think, you know, uh,
00:53:57.400
Mr. Gottfried had already, uh, addressed to some level that, yeah, it is a coalition of those who
00:54:01.660
benefit from kind of the reconstruction of the social hierarchy of the West. Uh, let's see. Uh,
00:54:09.260
we have Brad didn't hear again for $10. Thank you, sir. Gottfried is exactly right. The church
00:54:13.880
suffers from the same leftward ratchet that neocons animate in the political. It is the
00:54:19.180
precisely because we have unwittingly accepted the therapeutic framework for thinking about issues
00:54:25.760
that the Bible speaks of solely in moral terms. That's very interesting. Yes. The, the entry of
00:54:30.580
the therapeutic, not only into the government, but into every realm, including ones like theology that
00:54:35.900
you think would exclude it from, from kind of its realm. It's correct. Absolutely. Let's see here.
00:54:42.880
We've got one more, I believe. Uh, TB 88 for $10. Thank you very much. Uh, is AI run society,
00:54:52.160
the final form of managerialism, all spheres of human life are managed by therapeutic AI, removing the
00:54:58.640
decisions human of human action that is vilified in favor of procedure. Many people do have this fear
00:55:05.620
that artificial intelligence after being given a framework of wokeism will then be placed in
00:55:12.420
charge of many of these, uh, many, many of these different institutions creating kind of a feedback
00:55:18.160
loop that will accelerate it even further. No, I, I think that's possible. Uh, the, uh, there's
00:55:25.080
absolute woke fanaticism by now. And, you know, it, it sort of, it, it permeates most scientific and
00:55:32.480
technological activities. So this, this would not surprise me if it eventually happened.
00:55:38.780
And then one more here from Quartz ZZ7. Thank you. $5 Canadian. Sorry about Canada. Uh, stream, uh,
00:55:47.320
steam programming is now shoehorned into anti-black racism programs as a base level made this be the
00:55:54.620
start of infighting. Interesting. Yeah. We have seen a number of people asserting that many of these
00:55:59.720
fields like we already talked about are, are anti-black in their nature. Um, do you see that
00:56:06.400
as a, as a possible fracture of the coalition there? What does steam stand for? I think he might
00:56:12.600
have meant stem, but I could be wrong. Uh, that's what I assumed he was talking about. If, if not,
00:56:18.360
maybe he'll be able to clarify that, but, but if we just want to go with that, that I think there
00:56:24.460
will inevitably be competition for getting the plums of government, you know, for, by, by these,
00:56:30.900
by these groups. Um, what, uh, one of the things I've, I've written on is the way Republicans, um,
00:56:38.820
uh, pretend that the people who vote for the Democrats, particularly racial minorities are
00:56:44.260
just victims. They're no way responsible for what they do. Um, and therefore we have to champion
00:56:50.360
in, uh, charter schools, uh, because these people are being victimized. Well, my view is,
00:56:55.940
is much crueler. Uh, it is that the people who voted for the democratic party in New York
00:57:00.500
and voted against, um, uh, voted against Zeldin, who was a perfectly reasonable candidate who would
00:57:07.320
have given them money for charter schools deserve what they get. And, you know, if they and the
00:57:13.040
teachers unions fight within the democratic party, that's great. Uh, I see no reason for Republicans,
00:57:18.700
you know, to run to the rescue of people who don't like them, you know, and say that they're
00:57:22.700
victims, um, and we have to help them. Um, I think, I think it's very, very bad politics to do
00:57:29.220
something like that. Uh, but, but there will inevitably be clashes among the, uh, the groups
00:57:35.060
that are, you know, vying for special favors as victims within the, the therapeutic order.
00:57:40.920
Yeah. I think we're already seeing that for instance, um, many of the, uh, establishment left
00:57:46.580
who are white have already figured out that they can move to like non-binary as a, as a quick hack
00:57:53.680
to get around the, the, uh, establishment hierarchy. Right. And they can get the, the, and many of the,
00:57:59.220
uh, uh, minorities in that group, racial minorities are now very angry at them. There's infighting
00:58:04.480
already inside that as to whether this is a legitimate oppression status, because it's so easy
00:58:09.560
for, you know, uh, uh, for, uh, white leftists to go ahead and mimic victimhood by, by using this,
00:58:16.100
by just, you know, wearing some different clothes or something. So I haven't quite heard how feminist
00:58:20.780
and Muslim fundamentalists can be united. They are an Ilan Omar, right? I mean, she tries to,
00:58:27.180
she's both a extreme Muslim and a radical feminist at the same time. A person like her would not be
00:58:33.100
allowed to exist, you know, in a Muslim, most Muslim countries, um, uh, she'd have to choose
00:58:39.080
one or the other. If she chose to be a radical feminist, she'd have to live here or in some other
00:58:43.220
Western country. I have one more question for you before we wrap up, because you, you got me thinking
00:58:48.480
about this with, with the failures of, of, of STEM and, and these other fields. What do you think about
00:58:54.700
the counter counter elites, like the possibility of guys like Elon Musk, are they going to emerge more
00:59:01.100
frequently because they can't do the things they want to do inside the woke, uh, social structure?
00:59:07.080
Will we start to see people try to escape this simply because they can no longer explore Mars
00:59:12.260
or something while shackled to the hierarchy that's being established by kind of the woke, uh, uh, agenda?
00:59:19.800
Yeah, I, I think to some extent, um, you know, Musk does believe what he says. He believes in open
00:59:25.420
discussion, which obviously the woke left, the left does not. Somebody like Bezos can do very well
00:59:30.880
right. Um, uh, even, even if they're, uh, uh, even if he's shackled and has to accept, you know,
00:59:36.800
woke positions and so forth, he doesn't seem to mind. Um, and then, you know, there, there, there,
00:59:42.060
there, there are many other people within the leftist orbit who, who operate that way and making a lot
00:59:46.520
of money. Um, I, I think, you know, we, we, we have to, uh, um, give credit to Musk for breaking from
00:59:54.540
this. Um, now he, he may be able to make some, a little more money in the end or something like
01:00:00.000
that, but I, I think he was really acting out of conviction and, uh, uh, he's some, he's some sort
01:00:06.440
of left libertarian, but a libertarian. And I think he was genuinely offended, uh, by, by what Twitter
01:00:12.920
did in closing people's accounts because, uh, because they didn't agree with the, the political
01:00:17.780
left. So, uh, I, I think he was acting out of conscience. Absolutely. All right, guys. Well,
01:00:24.280
we're going to go ahead and start wrapping this up, but Dr. Godfrey, before we go, I know you said
01:00:29.060
there's an anthology coming out with Chronicles, and I would really love it if you would give my
01:00:33.720
audience a book recommendation to start. If they've never read your work, where would you, uh, suggest
01:00:40.640
that they begin? I know there's a lot there, but, but if you could just hand them one book, what would
01:00:44.680
it be? It's sort of, it's sort of very hard to decide. And most of my books are difficult reading.
01:00:50.100
Um, look at the book of multiculturalism and the politics of guilt published, I think in 19,
01:00:55.940
2002, 2003. Uh, some of the examples I give are dated by now because his, you know, the current
01:01:03.380
events just keep changing. Um, but the, uh, you might find the, the structure of ideas interesting in
01:01:11.000
the critique of the left. Um, uh, another book I recommend is my book on anti-fascism,
01:01:17.140
which came out two years ago. Um, and as an attempt to sort of make sense of woke ideology
01:01:23.820
through the prison of anti-fascism and the various interpretations of fascism, you know,
01:01:30.520
since the 1930s, um, the current definite definitions, um, are entirely arbitrary. They have
01:01:38.440
nothing to do with historic fascism. So I recommend that. And there would be, there will be an
01:01:44.320
anthology, um, on paleo conservatism, but Lexington books is bringing that out and that will be
01:01:51.480
available by next month by February, early February. Excellent. Well, thank you guys for coming by and
01:01:58.020
thank you to Dr. Gottfried. Really appreciate it. I think this is a fascinating stream. I know a lot of
01:02:02.640
people were very excited about it. So very happy to have you on guys. If it's your first time here,
01:02:07.560
please make sure that you are subscribing to the channel. And of course, if you want to listen to
01:02:11.700
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01:02:16.100
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01:02:21.440
really helps with everything, but thanks for talking to us guys. And as always, we'll see you next time.